Friday, November 15, 2024 at 4:00PM by Eric Blume
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN remains unseen, but Chalamet is already a major Best Actor contender.
I recently posted about the Best Director Oscar race, and how the same five men seem to be on almost every prognosticator list in town.
A similar thing seems to be happening in the Best Actor Oscar race as well. Almost anywhere you go, these five names seem to fill everyone's list...
Monday, November 11, 2024 at 8:00PM 
ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD earned DiCaprio his seventh and, to this day, final Oscar nomination. Do you think he’ll be back in the race anytime soon?
Former teenage heartthrob turned Academy Award-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio just hit the half-century mark. Happy birthday to the superstar who has been entertaining audiences since his youth and has, in recent years, expanded his work to producing movies and fighting the good fight in the name of our crumbling environment. Over time, many of his performances and most iconic movies have been explored at The Film Experience by various team members. It seems logical to revisit some of those posts, like we did to celebrate Jessica Lange's 75th birthday and Maggie Smith's passing. It's time to go down the blogging rabbit hole and share some love for the man immortalized on screen through roles like Shakespeare's Romeo, Jack Dawson, a handful of Scorsese leads, and more – the list goes on and on…
Monday, October 28, 2024 at 4:00PM 
Joaquin Phoenix's last great performance was in C'MON C'MON.
Do you have your own dream Oscar ballots lying around? I've been doing them for ages, probably since first finding The Film Experience and becoming entranced by Nathaniel's Film Bitch Awards. In recent years, the mountains of notebooks finally came to be formally digitized, starting with the long process of creating Letterboxd lists out of every Oscar eligibility rulebook, going back to 1927. This way, I was able to make a massive Excel spreadsheet with ballots for every year, following AMPAS guidelines. Oh well, much ado about nothing. The only reason I'm bringing this up is to contextualize the bizarre birthday post in store for today, when Joaquin Phoenix celebrates his mid-century mark.
As the Todd Haynes fiasco and the disappointing Joker diptych have made Joaquin Phoenix something of a sore subject, let's go back to happier times and better movies. Indeed, let me present an alternative Oscar history. The thespian remains a winner but under very different circumstances…
Sunday, August 11, 2024 at 9:30PM 
After the dust settles and the rush of euphoria dissipates, an Oscar victory can be cause for woe rather than joy. Sometimes, a win is a loss in the big picture, even something of a curse. The effects may not be immediate or felt in the flesh by the prizewinner. Not in life, at least. It's their legacy that takes the toll. Those considered robbed will always have their defenders, misfortune becoming legend, another kind of validation no less impressive than the little gold man they failed to grasp. But those who the Academy rewarded are a different story. They become villains in recollection, mayhap fools. It's a sad affair because, more often than not, those whom history paints in these unfortunate colors are themselves robbed. The glory of victory isn't theirs to enjoy, merit buried by outrage over injustice.
Such is the case of Art Carney, who won the Best Actor Oscar at the 47th Academy Awards for the now 50-year-old Harry and Tonto, besting such high-regarded turns as Pacino in The Godfather Part II and Nicholson in Chinatown. Did he deserve the prize? Maybe not. Does he deserve to have his triumph regarded as a mistake, a joke, a robbery? Hell no…
Tuesday, July 9, 2024 at 10:00PM 
Axel Foley's back! Thirty years after John Landis' Beverly Hills Cops III, the franchise has been revived by Netflix, and the fourth movie is already on streaming. Across its various iterations, the series about a Detroit cop solving crimes in Beverly Hills has varied in its balance between action and comedy. However, Eddie Murphy's presence is a constant, conferring a semblance of consistency in the films. Indeed, his impact is so strong that one can easily classify him as the franchise's defining auteur. No need to be in the director's chair when one's presence in front of the camera transforms the pictures, shaping them around the gravitational pull of a true movie star.
To mark the occasion, let's look back at the flick that started it all. In 1984, Martin Brest's Beverly Hills Cop confirmed Eddie Murphy as an A-lister, and might have even come close to Oscar glory…
1984, Action, Almost There, Best Actor, Beverly Hills Cop, Eddie Murphy, Martin Brest, Netflix, Oscars (80s), comedy 